Passion Fruit Revisited

Our passion fruit vine has featured in a number of posts so far. It is one of our more prolific crops and is also a great attraction to a range of wild life (butterflies, humming-birds and MASSIVE bees). This makes for great animal-life watching, as the vine is positioned directly opposite our beloved plastic table and chair setup on the balcony.

The passion fruit is a vigorous, climbing vine that clings by tendrils (see pictures) to almost any support. In our case, it has completely (almost) enveloped a citrus (maybe lemon) tree, forming a cloak that eerily moves as one entity when the wind blows.

Our first experience of a passion fruit was not overly impressive. We both found it to be very sour and not overly tasty. Nick found the texture of the fruit extremely unpleasant. My sister Naama assured me that the second passion fruit she sampled was a lot sweeter. Interestingly, online sources suggest that it is best to wait for the passion fruit to drop on their own rather than pick them so its possible that the first one we sampled fell prematurely (it was rather green…). Given our recent land clearings, the ground underneath the passion fruit vine is nicely exposed. This means I can actually see when fruit fall off the vine and quickly scoop ’em up before various critters get to them.

I recently decided that it was time to resample the passion fruit. Given all the proported health benefits (high in Vitamin A+C, reduces high blood pressure and is an anticarcinogen), seemed silly not to. Also, I was running out of room in my fridge fruit drawer…

I am now quite addicted to our lovely fruit (Nick has not changed his opinion that the texture and smell are unpleasant). I especially like it spooned over a nice bowl of vanilla ice-cream.

It is definitely invasive– many people chop down the vines so they don’t take over. I’ve read that the yellow passionfruit is more productive and less subject to pests and diseases if allowed to climb a tall tree, which is exactly what ours does. We see the top of the host tree from the balcony and it does appear to try to ‘pop out’ above the vine. It will be interesting to see what happens when the vine eventually comes to the end of its life (life span is 3-5 years supposedly and our is likely halfway there).